fingers brush the metal around the keyhole, and then my arm falls at my side.
They took away my key.
I kick the door, wincing at the stab of pain that shoots through my foot, and throw myself on the bed.
A decade’s worth of tears flood out of me. Then I just lie there with a sore head and aching eyes until I can’t stay awake anymore.
Sometime later, someone comes into my room. I don’t bother turning around to see who it is.
They don’t stay.
Chapter Seventeen
Candy
I knock on the pool house’s door.
“What?”
Not exactly an invitation. If I wasn’t so desperate to get to the bottom of this, I’d have left. But fuck it—I want answers.
I deserve answers.
As soon as my mother spots me, her face falls. “What are you doing out of your room?”
“I need to talk to you.”
She shrugs, pursing her lips as she turns her back on me. I stand in the doorway, my guts growing cold. But then I see she’s topping up her glass of wine, and it just happened to be standing behind her.
When she faces me again, it’s with a hard frown. “So talk,” she says, gesturing with her brimming wine glass.
“Can I have a glass?”
We’ve never had a drink together. I guess it says a lot for our relationship that at seventeen, I’ve had more to drink with my stepfather than my real mom.
“That would be illegal.”
I blink a few times and then shake my head. “Illegal,” I parrot.
“You’re under twenty-one.” Mom cocks her head. “Do I need to explain it to you? No wonder your grades are so shit.”
My heart’s in my throat. Even my fingertips have gone cold.
I wasn’t expecting a warm hug and a kiss on the cheek or anything, but this? It’s as if I’ve become my mother’s own worst enemy.
“What is your problem?” The words slip out before I can stop them, but then I’m glad I said them because my mother’s chin moves back and her stare hardens.
“You gonna talk to your mother like that?”
“I’m not even sure I am talking to my mom.” I wave a hand in her direction. “You’re like, some alien clone or something. What the hell did I do to piss you off?”
She takes a big sip of wine, and her throat moves as she swallows it. “It’s always about you, isn’t it?”
I take a step back as if I can somehow gain clarity by taking in more of this moment.
Always about me?
“Me?” I say through a laugh, touching fingertips to my chest. “I’m not the one who can’t keep a man long enough for her own daughter to finish out a grade.”
I expected her to flip out at that.
Instead, her mouth curls into an unfriendly smile. “You think we kept moving because they dumped me?”
They included more guys than I can count on both hands. And those were just the ones she actually had a relationship longer than a few hours with. I was convinced she was a prostitute at one stage, except I never saw money exchange hands. No folded bills left on the dressers, and the client turnover was a bit pathetic for her to be earning enough to keep us alive by selling off her pussy.
Mom comes around the bar, her wine sloshing left to right but never spilling. “Remember Harry?”
I shake my head. Who the hell could keep track of all the guys Mom’s boned? Not I. Oh no, not I.
“He’s the sweetheart that let us live in his trailer for those few months after I lost the gig at the diner. We had to leave after I hit him over the head with a frying pan.”
My mouth falls open. I shake my head.
She’s delusional. She’s gone and lost her goddamn mind. “I—that didn’t happen. It couldn’t—”
“Oh, you didn’t see it,” she says glibly, giving me another cold smile from behind her glass. “I made sure you were in bed already.”
“Why the hell would you—?”
“I’d had enough of him staring at you through the crack in the door while you were showering.”
“What?” I laugh. “He never…”
Is that why I’d always felt eyes on me? Not just when I showered. He didn’t live in the trailer with us, but he was around an awful lot. I thought it was just because he and Mom were boning, but he’d been there a lot when she was at work, too.
School was too far, so I spent the whole day in the trailer. I’d play outside sometimes, but Mom had told me it